For some time I’ve had a mission to find a photograph of the house on Fremont Avenue in downtown Los Angeles where the Alvarado family lived in the late teens and early 1920s. I’ve spent many hours combing through online collections of historical photographs, hoping to find some clue that would give me a window into the neighborhood where my grandmother grew up and was married off at the age of 15, where my granduncle Carlos died in the flu epidemic of 1918, where my great-grandfather died in 1921.

Imagine how I feel today; I’ve solved the puzzle and have a photo of that neighborhood and the very house. Read the rest of this entry »

Ludwig Josef “Louis” Stoltz (1866-1958)

From this valley they say you are going.
We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile,
For they say you are taking the sunshine
That has brightened our pathway a while.

So come sit by my side if you love me.
Do not hasten to bid me adieu.
Just remember the Red River Valley,
And the one that has loved you so true.

—”Red River Valley,” folk song, ca. 1879

My great-grandfather Ludwig Josef “Louis” Stoltz would witness a vast change in the United States during his 92 years. Born shortly after his father returned from the Civil War, he was a settler in the Red River Valley of the harsh Dakota Territory, relocated as soon as the West was connected by railways, settled in a predominately Mexican frontier and raised children who spoke Spanish, suffered through the Great Depression and lived to see grandsons serve in World War II and the Korean War. Read the rest of this entry »

Henry (1905-1905) and Edward (1905-1906) Stoltz

We all knew about the eight children my great-grandparents Ludwig Josef “Louis” Stolz (1866-1958) and Apolonia Luján (1872-1929) raised in El Paso. One of these children, Louis Gustave Stoltz, died in 1928 at the age of 30. The other seven are the progenitors of the California and Texas branch of the Stoltz family, while my great-grandfather’s siblings all remained in the north in a swath stretching from Minnesota through North Dakota, Montana and Washington.

The State of Texas has digitized and made available online decades of death certificates. Through this rich treasure of documentation I was able to find information about Louis and Apolonia and almost all of their children, including another two our family was not aware of; a girl born in July 1913 who lived only a week, and a boy stillborn in 1915.

Somewhere along the way I discovered a birth record for twin boys born to Louis and Apolonia on February 26, 1905. The birth was at their home at 4th and Tays, and the twins were unnamed. In the place for the name the doctor, Howard Thompson, had written “Infants Stoltz” and noted that they were “Born alive (Both).”

But there were no death records online for the twins, and no one in the family had ever heard of Louis and Apolonia having twins. What happened to them? Read the rest of this entry »

James Dunham (1758-1829) and Elizabeth Robbins Dunham (1758-1820)

In the spirit of Halloween, when traditionally styled gravestones are popping up on lawns everywhere, I offer the real thing.

Through the magic of findagrave.com, which contains some 65 million cemetery records, I found today photographs of headstones of several early Maine relatives, including the above gravestone of my 4th great-grandparents James Dunham (1758-1829) and Elizabeth Robbins (1758-1820) from the Carmel Village Cemetery in Carmel, Penobscot, Maine. I love the symbol of the hand pointing to the heavens.

The town of Carmel was incorporated June 21, 1811, previous to which it was known as Plantation No. 3, in the third range. The records begin with the report of the meeting held March 2, 1812, at which meeting James was elected field driver.

According to the General Laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Maine was a “department” of Massachusetts until 1820 when it was admitted to the Union as the 23rd state as part of the Missouri Compromise):

Every field driver shall take up horses, mules, asses, neat cattle, sheep, goats or swine going at large in the public ways, or on common and unimproved land within his town and not under the care of a keeper; and any other inhabitant of the town may take up such cattle or beasts so going at large on Sunday, and for taking up such beasts on said day the field driver or such other inhabitant of the town may in tort recover for each beast the same fees which the field driver is entitled to receive for taking up like beasts.

Isaac Dunham (1787-1856)

Isaac Dunham was the first keeper of the lighthouse at Pemaquid Point, Maine, near Bristol in Lincoln County. After many catastrophic shipwrecks at that place, an act of May 18, 1826 provided $4,000 for the construction of the lighthouse. The lighthouse went into service on November 29, 1827 with Isaac, my first cousin five times removed, appointed as the keeper at a salary of $350 per year.

Isaac was familiar with the nautical lifestyle; he had served as a privateer in the War of 1812 on the ship of his father, Captain Cornelius Dunham (1748-1835), my 4th great-granduncle and brother to James Dunham (1758-1829), my 4th great grandfather, who served in the Revolutionary war. Isaac’s mother was Lydia Atwood (1753-1841). Pemaquid Point was kept lighted by an innovation of Isaac’s — a patented method to keep lamp oil from congealing in the cold Maine winters.

The acclaimed American artist Edward Hopper painted a watercolor of the Pemaquid lighthouse in the summer of 1929 on a Maine trip with his wife, Jo. The lighthouse was restored in 2007-2010 and today some 100,000 people visit it annually. It is the obverse image representing Maine in the State Quarters series.

Isaac Dunham is my first cousin five times removed